Searching refers to a process in which a user submits a query, such as a list of keywords, and receives in return a search result. The search result is a set of one or more items in a search domain matching the query. For example, a query may be applied against a search domain of documents, such as web pages or other documents containing text or having text associated with them. A query may similarly be applied against a search domain corresponding to the catalog of products or services available for purchase from an online merchant.
For expansive search domains, it is common for a query result presented to a user to contain a significant number of items that would be considered by the user to be irrelevant to his or her query. For example, a query result for the query “jaguar” may include items relating to jaguar animals, Jaguar automobiles, the Jaguar operating system, or the Jacksonville Jaguars football team. A user submitting the query who is interested in jaguar animals would consider items relating to the automobiles, operating system, and football team to be irrelevant, and the presence of these additional items in the query result would make the query result less useful to this user.
The results provided by additional kinds of item navigation techniques, such as item browsing, often suffer from similar relevancy deficiencies.
Accordingly, an approach to performing navigation requests and/or presenting their results that reduced the number of items presented to users that would be considered irrelevant by the users to their queries would have significant utility.